So after talking a bit with Shuttler, I realised that while my knowledge of EVE barely scratches the surface, there are many players that really need to get their foot in the door. So here is my guide to starting a Gallante pilot without feeling like your brain is going to eat itself from the inside out. This guide assumes first off that you have played the tutorial. If you haven’t, PLAY THE TUTORIAL!

Grouping

First and foremost, EVE is not a solo experience. You can solo EVE, but you won’t like the experience. Since I assume your a GAX-aholic reading this as you are, get into the MOG Army channel and stay there! Go to channels and mailing lists, join, and input MOGArmy in the prompt that comes up. You’ll probably see 3-6 people sitting around \o ing and staying pretty quiet mostly. Why are they so quiet, you ask? Because they are all in Vent. Please get on vent, I hate my voice and I still get on there to work stuff out. We have an EVE channel, just keep an eye out for Foxmoon, Kaiu, and Hinkz they are far more experienced at the game than myself, I’m sure if you asked nicely they would be glad to help you figure stuff out.

In the same line, if you can get a group together for some early level 1 missions, do so! You will help each other, and you can take both take missions allowing you to chain them one after another, it’s less work and time overall than taking the missions one at a time and in EVE every little bit counts.

Early Jobs

As a newbie in EVE you have your choice of a few basic jobs to collect your starting capital, mining, ratting and missioning. Mining actually requires slightly less skill investment than missioning if you start out a character specifically geared towards it. The problem is, it’s boring as all sin, and especially with Goonswarm targeting high sec afk miners, getting to be a VERY dangerous profession. If you happen to get immediate acceptance into a 0.0 corp it will work out for you much better, since 0.0 is great pay-off and is far better structured allowing you to actually be safer in most cases than you would in low sec. Ratting is a constant slide down into low sec and takes pretty much all the same skills that you would need to have in order to mission, it’s a good way to loose ships and really won’t make you money as quickly or consistently as mission running will. Mission running, which the rest of this guide will assume is to be your starting job is surprisingly easy to get into, and can be some fun with a group.

So what are you going to need for mission running, well first let’s talk equipment.

Goal 1: Fitting your Incursus

Meet your new best friend, the Incursus. Now you could, conceivably pilot a Tristan instead, and if you want to switch to Caldari ships at a latter point, the Tristans launcher hardpoints make it a good starting point. Still either one will require pretty much the same fitting from a pure Gallente stand-point so I’m just going to stick to my favorite.

An Incursus fits 3 high slots, 2 medium slots, and 2 low slots, I don’t know if that’ll mean alot to you yet, but it will, trust me it will. Our primary goal is those high slots, frigates don’t tank(stand and recover from damage) especially well so we will focus ourselves on destroying stuff before we get hit. In those high slots we will want 3 150mm named railguns, in the mid slots we’ll want an afterburner and maybe a shield extender, and in those low slots we’ll want an armor repairer and an armor plate(deactivated, I’ll explain later). But remember that is a “goal” so lets go over what you’re going to need to get to the point of making that setup effective.

Skills

Before we talk about what to train, here is a tip on how to train. While you are on-line running missions, pick your shortest training time skills, these are usually skills that need to get to levels one and 2, and sometimes 3. When you are about to log off, check your skills that are level 3 plus, pick either the most important one or the one that will be training for the time closest to the actual of amount of time you plan to be away and set that to train. This will allow you to bumb through your low level skills while you’re around to consistently change training, and then lets the highest ones go without your having to think about it too much.

As to what skills you will need… You will want to invest in these trees in order.LearningGunneryElectronicsEngineeringMechanicalDrones*Social

* This is what I call an IF skill. IF you project yourself to be running missions on an incredibly regular basis after you’ve been playing long enough to have all these other trees pretty much full, then you really should invest in it. IF not, don’t go in beyond level 2.

Learning

These skills will decrease the time it takes to learn other skills, you should get learning itself up to level 5, and all the other ones, excepting possibly charm for the time being, at least up to level 4. The second tier learning skills cost 4.5 mil (roughly the same as a Gallente Cruiser) a book in high sec, so I don’t expect you to be able to even afford them for a while yet.

Gunnery

Your rail guns are your bread and butter in mission running, a good 150mm railgun burst can pop a drone or light frigate instantly. Better yet, they mean you can run away from your enemies, most level 1 enemies will max their range at 10k, and keep firing at them out at ranges of 20-30k. Invest in the namesake, then hybrid turrets, then sharpshooting, then go for damage. Doing less damage at a longer range is an okay trade off especially early on and in groups.

Electronics

Actually not so much the whole tree, but focus in on targetting, get that up to level 3 or 4 at least. It won’t help to awe inspiring power in your turrets if your constantly hung up trying to make a new target lock.

Engineering and Mechanical

These two may be low in the list but I can’t overstate their importance. The two namesake skills will increase your maximum power grid and CPU allowing you to fit more and more powerful equipment. Better yet, they are very important skills to flying battle cruisers and battle ships effectively. Once you have the namesakes down, branching out into the upgrade and armor trees will help you to fit the best possible tank.

Drones

I put drones as last because they really won’t effect your Incursus too much. Still working on them early can only help a pure Gallente pilot, a lot of Gallentian power is concentrated in drone based ships. When you step out beyond scout drones, you’ll also find EW drones, repair drones, scouting drones, all of which can be very important to a PvP player.

Social

Negotiation and Social will both increase what you get back from an agent after a mission. The differences probably won’t be hugely apparant until levels 4-5. Now if you’re going to be mission running why not invest in mission running skills? Because if your just trying to grab some starting isk, you’ll wind up with them trained while two skills that could really be a major assets as your moving into crusiers or destroyers are still waiting for some TLC. And probably just in time to be moving on to cruisers and the job you really want to take in EVE.

Important Mission Running Info

I’d say find the system Oursallent(sp?), and get over there pretty soon, it’s where Foxmoon and I have been based out of so both of us are only a jump or three away. Then open people and places and enter Federation Navy in the search box, searching for corporations. You’ll come up with a list, just take vanilla Federation Navy, you’ll want to right click on it and show info. In the window that opens up click the agents tab, and open the sublisting for Internal Security, now you should come up with a list of available agents, what you are looking for is one with quality -17 or lower (-18, -19, -20, etc…) close to Ours. If you can take Esate Black, I highly recommend it.

These will be almost entirely combat missions, so be ready to pwn some drones and frigates. His missions will seem pretty sameish after the first three or so. If you can’t access him, find the agent in the Navy that you can take that is closest to Ours. You can check this from any location in space by bookmarking the agent’s location, then setting that as your destination, open the map and search for Ours, then add it as a waypoint. Go to your autopilot tab and count the number of jumps between them.

If you have any questions throw them at MOG Chat or Vent and someone should be able to answer you.